I Do Not Remember My Life and It's Fine

This post is part of the List of Introspective Descriptions.

I've written about aphantasia several times before on this blog, and many people have shown interest in the topic. Most readers are simply curious when I say that I can't form any kind of image, sound, or other sensation in my mind. Occasionally, someone shows pity or commiseration towards me, as if I were in constant, daily suffering from a crippling disability. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. I've been successful at most of what I've tried to accomplish in my life until now, and never had to battle with a sense of being disadvantaged. On top of that, even aphantasia experts generally agree that it is not a disorder.

That is not to say that I feel as capable as anyone else at everything. In particular, there is an area in which I do feel—all too well—that I am weaker than most: my memory of past episodes.

For obvious reasons, my recollections lack a visual component, but that is only part of the story. I seem to have an extremely poor ability to "relive" past events mentally. In fact, my condition is accurately described as

a mnemonic syndrome that is confined to an inability to mentally travel backwards in time in the absence of detectable neuropathology or significant daily handicap,

which is the definition of a trait called SDAM, for Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory.

SDAM was only discovered in 2015, and it is still poorly understood. Yet there is mounting evidence that it has deep links with aphantasia: about half of the people with SDAM also report having aphantasia, and many people with aphantasia claim to have difficulties with recalling past episodes from their own lives. For these reasons, I believe I have SDAM or something closely resembling it.

What does that imply, though? That is what I aim to clarify with this post. I always find it very difficult to tell how much of my subjective experience is rare and how much of it is normal for most of humanity. I've never swapped brains with anyone to find out. The only solution I've found is to try my best at explaining what the inner experience is like for me, and hope to receive comments from readers who have similar—or entirely different—experiences.

Below are some brief observations about the way my episodic memory works, based on notes I took over the past couple of years.

Recalling Specific Episodes

When I was looking for my first job, a Japanese company I applied to had me fill in a screening questionnaire. One question was something along these lines: "Write about a time during your university studies in which you faced a difficult problem, and what you did to overcome it." A perfectly reasonable question to ask a potential recruit with no employment history, but an impossibly hard question for me to answer.

I was completely stumped. In my university years, I worked on many research projects, and it wasn't always easy. I knew I had faced various kinds of problems during my graduate studies, and I assumed I had overcome them all before getting my degree. Why couldn't I come up with a single example?

This was the first time I noticed that something was off. Those questions about relevant episodes are pretty standard in certain industries, and I had never heard anyone complain about them specifically. Yet they were anathema for me.

My memory feels like a file cabinet without labels, a database without an index, a dictionary of randomly-ordered words without a table of contents. There are many memories there, but most of them can't be retrieved with convenient keywords like "a time when X happened".

Only with very specific cues and external help am I able to, sometimes, recall the events I'm looking for. In the case of the job application questionnaire, I struggled with it for several days, asked a friend for advice, and eventually managed to put together a lame but passable answer based on my research notes. Still, I was left with the nagging feeling that more fitting and relevant examples remained buried away in my psyche, somewhere out of reach.

I felt the same limitation very strongly again last year, when my grandfather passed away. I determined to sit down and write everything I could remember about him, and my relationship with him. I went back in my mind to his house in the Roman countryside and wrote things as they came to me.

He was kind and jovial with us grandchildren. He often involved us in making bread and pizza together in his stone oven, and I liked that. I could even write a general visual description (not by putting into words what I saw in my mind at the time of writing, but by recalling what I "knew" about his looks). And so on, I could muster a good number of generic, timeless facts about him, including my feelings related to him, but I soon realized that episodes and conversations were sorely absent: alright, he used to keep bees, and took me to see them more than once; but how many times? What did we say during those visits? What happened specifically?

Nothing that resembles a "scene" or sequence of events resurfaced in my memory. Everything I wrote was in the past progressive tense: "he used to be like this", "we would often do that", "more than once we did so".

Nowhere in what I wrote was any sense of sequential events, nor any specific conversation, not to mention specific utterances. I could write a good deal about him, but I had to rely on educated guesses in order to put together a coherent description of things that happened.

I wanted to bring back specific episodes, one-time events that we had experienced together, but I could find very little. He was there in my mind, no mistake about that, but in an intangible, elusive way. That day I felt disheartened, and dropped the project in the middle.

Most of the time this weakness in recollecting specific life episodes doesn't have major practical consequences. If necessary, others can help me bring back a memory, and I can remember the most consequential information as facts rather than episodes. In fact, a recent study has found that aphantasics aren't any worse than non-aphantasics as eyewitnesses: although the participants "recalled 30% less correct information and accounts were less complete," "they made no more errors and were as accurate as typical imagers."

The downsides, then, seem to be mostly emotional, not pragmatic.

(If you're wondering how I can remember this "episode" of me trying to write about my grandfather, it's because I have the unfinished text saved, and wrote my reflections about the attempt soon afterwards. I have what I need to reconstruct the episode without leaning very much on my remembering powers.)

Memory Voids

The blank I drew with my grandfather is just an example of what you might call a "memory void." It's not that I tend to forget people. Indeed, my loved ones are safe in my mind, albeit in that intangible and elusive form, with no risk of being forgotten—more on this later. My memory voids are specifically about the concrete things I did in my life.

Ask me how my childhood was, or if I had fun in my twenties, and all I can answer is "I think so." Not because I wasn't sure about it at the time, but because I don't remember what I thought of it. With such broad and general questions, I have almost no hope of coming up with representative memories to help me answer those questions. No flashbacks to times I thought "this is great!" nor to moments of sadness. Again, many such events are buried as facts and observations somewhere in my memory, but that's not how I can recover them.

My past feels like someone else's. I know a great deal about it, more than anyone else in fact, yet I don't remember being in it. I can create a year-by-year history of my whole life with information such as the places I lived in, the schools I went to, the major turning points in my life; I can explain many facts about the key people and events of each time period; I can even arrange many of these in the form of stories or ordered stages of growth—yet none of this feels like things I did. It's like being the world's top expert about a stranger's life.

To be clear, this is not dissociative amnesia, trauma-induced selective forgetting, or anything like that. I know I had a good, sheltered childhood and early adulthood, with a caring and kind family, good friends, no financial difficulties, no scarring or traumatizing events. I was, by all measures, a happy and privileged kid. But I know that as a dry fact, not as a rush of nostalgic emotions.

Why aphantasia would do that to one's memory is still unclear. The topic itself hasn't been studied much yet, but this is slowly changing. In a very recent experiment, Boere et al. (2025) used EEG (electroencephalography) to show that there might be fundamental differences in neural activity at the time of forming new episodic memories, rather than at the time of retrieving them. Aphantasics, they found, have lower levels of the kind of brain waves associated with attention and, crucially, memory updating.

This is very interesting in itself, but the following observation in their abstract is arguably even more important:

Despite these neural differences, behavioral performance remained comparable, indicating possible compensatory strategies.

In other words, people with aphantasia don't fare significantly worse in their practical use of memory—they just use it in a different way.

Whenever I think about a period of my life, all the "situational" and somewhat "concrete" memories I get are averaged out, all similarities between separate days and recurrences overlapping each other and blending together, while all the deviations from routine are washed away into oblivion: everything in the past progressive.

Semantic and Spatial Memory Are Fine

If the results of Boere et al. are confirmed, this could shed some fascinating light on how different non-episodic, or "semantic" memory is from the episodic kind. In my case, semantic memory seems to be perfectly intact, and only the episodic, autobiographical kind is impaired.

From the observations above, it's as if my memory-encoding neural circuits work by comparing new experiences with pre-existing mental models, tweaking and tuning those mental models of the world with each new sensory input, rather than collecting separate instances of similar but slightly different situations.

This would explain why the important, recurrent facts remain, while all the fickle details are washed away as if by an averaging operation. Perhaps this is what goes on in everyone's brains, except that in most people the episode-storing circuits are also working at the same time, and the two processes feel inseparable.

The interpretation above would also explain why my mental models—the embedded prophesy devices I rely on to predict the future and function in everyday life—are as good as anyone else's. Indeed, it might even explain why I seem to care and think about mental models, and about cognition in general, more than the average person. For me, mental models are the main way I benefit from my memory. They help me not only to form reasonable expectations about what might happen in the future, but also to "reconstruct" my past—the educated guesses about my own past I referred to before.

And we shouldn't forget spatial awareness. This "sense of space and location" plays a major role in my thinking system.

For as long as I can remember, I've been very good at understanding maps and not getting lost. When I lived in Florence, at the age of nine or ten, I loved to be the one guiding my family through the city's meandering side-streets with the help of a paper map. I would choose (past progressive!) new and unknown routes every time, just for the fun of exploration, but we always ended up emerging into the square or courtyard I had intended.

For all the difficulties I have in recalling scenes that unfolded on specific days of my life, I have no trouble at all remembering the spatial layout of the places where those scenes took place. I can draw the floor map of any house I've lived in or spent more than a couple of days in the past 30 or more years. When I visit Rome, a city I haven't lived in for more than a decade, the routes to get anywhere familiar come back to me as clearly as if I had learned them the previous day. This is clearly another kind of memory, quite distinct from both the episodic and the semantic kinds.

As a matter of fact, spatial memory is the closest thing I have to an "index" for the musty file cabinet of my episodic memories. If I can remember where something happened, there is a good chance I can remember many more details about what happened.

This is a recent realization of mine, and I've taken to calling it the Swoosh Effect. Often my wife mentions an event or the name of a shop, saying something like "I miss the Flavor Savor hamburgers we used to go to when we lived in Nagareyama!" Usually, to her unconcealed dismay, I draw a complete blank: "what's the Flavor Savor?" We used to go there all the time, she says, and it wasn't even that long ago.

I get absolutely nothing. I frantically try to think of hamburger joints in Nagareyama: zero hits.

Then she adds some spatial information, like "it's on the last floor of the XYZ building in front of the station" and suddenly I'm transported there in a roller-coaster instant and it all comes back to me clearly. I almost feel the swooshing movement of going from the station to the entrance of XYZ building, then to the escalators, then up to the last floor, and finally homing into the entrance of the Flavor Savor, all in less than a second. Now all the semantic information pours out: "of course, the Flavor Savor! We went there, like, six times in a year. They have great avocado burgers and a tasty homemade sauce there!" If not too averaged-out, even some fragments of Flavor Savor episodes might come back to me at that point.

In short, I use my semantic and spatial memory to fill in what my episodic memory is unable to recover (or store). Most of the time this works fine, but in some cases that way of compensating doesn't work.

For example, I think I may also have mild face-blindness, the difficulty in recognizing faces and linking them with names. Usually, it doesn't cause major issues, and with some effort and repetition, I can learn to recognize people. But the face-blindness really rears its head when I meet someone not-so-familiar in an unexpected place, like random encounters on a train. Since I don't have the usual contextual cues to help me, in these cases I find it very hard to pin down who they are. They go "hey Marco, what's up?" and all I get is the vague sense that I know this person from somewhere. Only when they mention names or other contextual information do I have a chance of allocating them in their rightful place in my mental social network.

Not Bad, All in All

If you have intact episodic memory, some of the descriptions above might sound entirely alien to you. You might have many questions, and I don't know how to answer them all. Before concluding, though, I will try to address two of what might be your biggest doubts.

First, does my lack of remembered episodes and nostalgic flashbacks mean that the people in my life don't really exist as people in my mind, and that my forgotten experiences taught me nothing? No, and no.

It is hard to explain, but the things that matter do stay with me, even if I can't reminisce about the specific times they happened to me. I may not be able to play back fond memories of distinct interactions with my late grandfather, for instance, but I internalized them all. Intangible and invisible as he may be, he is there in my mind and will always be, and thinking about him does evoke many emotions in me—emotions I feel now, not replicas of past emotions. Something invisible can never fade.

More broadly, my mind's constant "averaging" work makes it very hard for me to build an encyclopedic memory—the minor details quickly escape me—but the understanding remains. The important insights stick with me, and my learning takes the form of better and better mental models: more sophisticated, more inclusive of many factors, more widely applicable or abstract. This, even when the specifics of how I obtained those insights refuse to be summoned back. Those vague "problems I had to overcome in university" that the job screening question wanted from me had happened, and I had learned my lessons from them, even though I forgot how they unfolded.

I consider this to be a key component of my intelligence because it allows me to concentrate on what is important. My experience is distilled directly into wisdom. Which brings me to the second doubt you might have: is SDAM a detestable handicap?

More so than with aphantasia, I can see how one might want to call SDAM a disorder. It does sound like a net negative, the removal of an ability that cannot be fully replaced, at least when your goal is to be "reunited" with a lost or distant loved one. Unlike aphantasia, I do often feel my weakness on this front, and I understand the many people with SDAM who bemoan their condition.

But—call me an indefatigable optimist—I also see benefits to having SDAM.

By doing away with reminiscences, flashbacks, and graphic visions of possible futures, I can stay focused on the now, and on what I can do now to improve tomorrow. I don't get intrusive scenes to distract me and sway me with sudden emotions.

Perhaps SDAM pushes me to work harder at interpreting the new information as I perceive it, because I know, deep down, that I will either "get" it now—updating a mental model—or I risk forever missing the opportunity to "get" it. This commitment to immediate understanding, in turn, helps me improve as a rational thinker.

And, once again, there is still no empirical proof that these memory "deficits" bring significant disadvantages in practice. The paper I mentioned at the beginning—the one that found no difference in eyewitness accuracy between people with and without aphantasia—makes this conclusion:

Our pattern of results indicates reduced mental imagery ability might be compensated for by alternative self-initiated cognitive strategies.

That is one fair way to put it. But here is another one, from my point of view: having strong mental imagery and episodic memory doesn't seem to help much in practice. It is just an alternative way to experience the world. ●